Secretary of State Johyn Kerry "Israel close to becoming apartheid state"

[El Kabong]

Now while our resident anti-Semites might be thinking "Well it's about damn time!" I for one see this statement from Sec. Kerry as his true feelings but also as one of the dumbest things ever said by a politician next to this....

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wMryErno5kg



It's irresponsible, untrue, and will no doubt aid our enemies in the Middle East which are numerous.


John Kerry should resign IMMEDIATELY! There is no comparison at all between Israel and South Africa during their apartheid years....Arabs serve in the Knesset, Arabs who seek the destruction of Israel serve in the Knesset!!! Israel has bent over backwards to help the "Palestinians" they've fought for ages with 1 hand tied behind their backs so as not to completely annihilate the "Palestinians".

Israel is the only free nation in the Middle East, the only nation in the Middle East which respects the human rights of minorities residing in that nation! To attempt to compare Israel and the old apartheid South Africa is unconscionable.

[Master]

You are right about freedom and democracy not being available in Saudi Arabia and the USA not raising it as an issue. I wonder why?

[El Kabong]

You are right about freedom and democracy not being available in Saudi Arabia and the USA not raising it as an issue. I wonder why?

Well the United States has sewn seeds of discontent with the Saudi people by propping up their horrid "Royal" family .....even the "royalty" don't necessarily like the United States....probably because they've done nothing for their money and are resentful that America wants their oil. Why be resentful? Why not? It's not like they have anything better to do, they can buy and sell whomever they please, they treat women disgracefully, their human rights records are horrendous and (as a nation) we do nothing. I've been for drilling and refining our own oil for some time simply because it's the right thing to do, but also because it keeps money out of the hands of terrorists who if not for oil would be poor as shit until there was a market for sand and camels!

The Saudi's disgust me more so than the Iranians to be honest. At least Iran had a right to be irritated with us, the Saudi's have 0 to bitch about....we hand over oceans of cash and what do we get besides oil? Outrage! Outrage apparently that we've time transported those fucking cavemen to the 21st century just by giving them money!

[Gandalf]

I've been saying that Israel is an apartheid state for years, but I don't think the American government really cares about that. In a moment they could make Israel grow up and treat the Palestinians with respect, but instead funnel billions of non-existent US money into Israel and pet projects like....the Ukraine. If it is an apartheid state then quit funding it, otherwise America clearly supports apartheid. The US pays lip service to democracy, but has close ties with Saudi Arabia and has corporate fascism domestically. The Ukraine conflict is kind of ironic as the US resembles communist Russia far more than present day Russia does. It is a domestic economic apartheid state run by corporatism at the expense of a general population that gets poorer year by year. We should ignore what John Kerry says as he is like a dinosaur wandering around roaring to non-plussed other dinosaurs a short time before the comet hits the earth.

[Kirkland Laing]

Israel has been an apartheid state for years. What Kerry is actually saying is that if Israel continues with its apartheid system then the fact that Israel is an apartheid state will become the considered position of the majority of people in the world and not the minority as is currently the case. When it's a majority opinion sanctions and isolation by the rest of the international community will inevitably follow.

Kerry is only saying what lots of prominent Israelis have already said, including two ex prime ministers. It's actually a fairly widespread opinion in Israel. It's interesting that things like Israel's apartheid system can be discussed and debated in Israel without the kind of reaction we've seen to what Kerry said. There's room for far more disagreement over Israeli policies in Israel than there is in America which just goes to show the power of the Israel lobby there.



I’ve made five additional visits to Israel since 1962, the last this summer as part of a humanitarian aid trip to East Jerusalem and the West Bank. As a Jew who has been an ardent supporter of Israel since its independence, it pains me to record what I saw there. But it is my love for Israel and for the Jewish people that drives me to speak out at this treacherous time.
What I witnessed in the West Bank—home to about 2.5 million Palestinians and 400,000 Israeli settlers—exceeded my worst expectations.

While the world’s statesmen have dithered, Israel has created a system of apartheid on steroids, a horrifying prison with concrete walls as high as twenty-six feet, topped with body-ravaging coils of razor wire. Spaced along these walls are imposing guard towers that harbor bunkers from which trespassers can be shot by Israeli soldiers. From this physical segregation—one land for Israelis; another, unequal land for Palestinians—flows a torrent of misery, violence and human rights abuses. The West Bank suffers from acute shortages of water, housing, jobs and healthcare. Palestinian children are separated from their parents, denied access to hospitals and stoned and beaten by Jewish settlers. Human rights sanctioned by international law, including the right to health, the prohibition on transferring populations into occupied territoriesand equality before the law are routinely violated….
How can Jews, who have been persecuted for centuries, tolerate this inhumanity? Where is their moral compass? How can this situation be acceptable to Judaism’s spiritual and political leaders? I don’t have that answer; except to say that Israel’s biggest enemy has become itself.


Apartheid on Steroids | The Nation






More than two-thirds of Israeli Jews say that 2.5 million Palestinians living in the West Bank should be denied the right to vote if the area was annexed by Israel, in effect endorsing an apartheid state, according to an opinion poll reported in Haaretz.
Three out of four are in favour of segregated roads for Israelis and Palestinians in the West Bank, and 58% believe Israel already practises apartheid against Palestinians, the poll found.
A third want Arab citizens within Israel to be banned from voting in elections to the country's parliament. Almost six out of 10 say Jews should be given preference to Arabs in government jobs, 49% say Jewish citizens should be treated better than Arabs, 42% would not want to live in the same building as Arabs and the same number do not want their children going to school with Arabs.
A commentary by Gideon Levy, which accompanied the results of the poll, described the findings as disturbing. "Israelis themselves … are openly, shamelessly and guiltlessly defining themselves as nationalistic racists," he wrote.
"It's good to live in this country, most Israelis say, not despite its racism, but perhaps because of it. If such a survey were released about the attitude to Jews in a European state, Israel would have raised hell. When it comes to us, the rules don't apply."


Israeli poll finds majority would be in favour of 'apartheid' policies | World news | theguardian.com




Citizenship law makes Israel an apartheid state

We do not have to identify the characteristics of South African apartheid in the civil rights discrimination in Israel in order to call Israel an apartheid state. It is best that we not try to evade the truth: The Citizenship Law's existence turns Israel into an apartheid state.



The government's decision last week to extend the validity of the Citizenship Law (Temporary Order), for another year, is evidence that the legal barriers preventing severe discrimination against Israel's Arab citizens and harm to their civil rights have been removed.
This extension is the eighth since the law was first passed in 2003, and it shows just how naive Justice Edmond Levy's position was when he refused to join in the 2006 decision by five judges from the High Court of Justice, who stated that the law was unconstitutional, that it contravened the Basic Law on Human Dignity and Freedom, and that it must be removed from the law books. Levy explained his refusal by saying that he saw no need to intervene because only two months remained until the law expired. However, at the end of the two months, the law was extended by a year, and now they want to extend it for yet another year.
Had Levy known that the law's limited validity was nothing but a deception aimed at preparing a discriminatory and unconstitutional law, there is no doubt he would have joined the five justices' majority opinion that it was unconstitutional and should be removed. We must hope that the High Court of Justice, when it rules on the new petition submitted against the law after it was extended in 2006, will take into account that the term "temporary provision," which both the government and Knesset take pains to stress, is a deception. We are talking about, in effect, a permanent law.


http://www.haaretz.com/print-edition...state-1.248635

[Kirkland Laing]

Jacobus Johannes Fouché, South African Minister of Defence during the apartheid era, compared the two states and said that Israel also practiced apartheid.[3]


In 2002 Anglican Archbishop and Nobel Peace Prize winner Desmond Tutu wrote a series of articles in major newspapers,[193] comparing the Israeli occupation of the West Bank to apartheid South Africa, and calling for the international community to divest support from Israel until the territories were no longer occupied.[193] In an April 2010 open letter to the University of Berkeley, Tutu wrote "I have been to the Occupied Palestinian Territory, and I have witnessed the racially segregated roads and housing that reminded me so much of the conditions we experienced in South Africa under the racist system of Apartheid. I have witnessed the humiliation of Palestinian men, women, and children made to wait hours at Israeli military checkpoints routinely when trying to make the most basic of trips to visit relatives or attend school or college, and this humiliation is familiar to me and the many black South Africans who were corralled and regularly insulted by the security forces of the Apartheid government."[194] In 2011, Tutu wrote an article for the Tampa Bay Times, arguing that Israeli apartheid is now so bad that only an international boycott can force Israel to change its policies.[195] In 2014, Tutu complained about the "systemic humiliation" of the Palestinian people by the "Israeli security forces".[196]


On 15 May 2008, 34 leading South African activists published an open letter in The Citizen, under the heading "We fought apartheid; we see no reason to celebrate it in Israel now!". The signatories, who included Kasrils and several other government ministers, COSATU General Secretary Zwelinzima Vavi, Ahmed Kathrada, Sam Ramsamy and Blade Nzimande, wrote "Apartheid is a crime against humanity. It was when it was done against South Africans; it is so when it is done against Palestinians!"[206]
On 6 June 2008, Mr. Kgalema Motlanthe, the Deputy President of South Africa and of the African National Congress, who had recently visited the Israeli-occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip, told a delegation of Arab Knesset members visiting South Africa to study its democratic constitution that conditions for Palestinians under occupation were "worse than conditions were for Blacks under the Apartheid regime".[207]
In 2008 a delegation of ANC veterans visited Israel and the Occupied Territories, and said that in some respects it was worse than apartheid.[208][209] One member said "The daily indignity to which the Palestinian population is subjected far outstrips the apartheid regime." Another member, human rights lawyer Fatima Hassan, cited the separate roads, different registration of cars, the indignity of having to produce a permit, and long queues at checkpoints as worse than what they had experienced during apartheid. But she also thought the apartheid comparison was a potential "red herring".[210] Andrew Feinstein, a former ANC parliament member, was shocked to see footage of teenagers heaping abuse on and throwing stones at Palestinian children, especially done in the name of Judaism. The delegation's final formal statement made no mention of comparisons with apartheid and Dennis Davis, a high court judge, said he thought the use of the term in the Middle East context was "very unhelpful".[208] Davis also noted, "There's no racial superiority here. There's no pervading ideology that confirms the inferiority of Palestinians." and concluded "But I think it's incredibly unhelpful to say you can simply take this to be apartheid and therefore the South African struggle is the same and the South African solution is the same. That's a very lazy form of reasoning."[211] One of the Jewish members of the delegation said that the comparison with apartheid is very relevant and that the Israelis are even more efficient in implementing the separation-of-races regime than the South Africans were, and that if he were to say this publicly, he would be attacked by the members of the Jewish community.[209]

[El Kabong]

Post all you like jackasses, I'm done reading your bullshit

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S9AZXxS1-Wo

[Kirkland Laing]

Lots of words and no pictures. Sorry about that Lyle.


Four decades later, the increasingly complex world of Israel's system of classification deems Said Rhateb to be a resident of the West Bank - somewhere he has never lived - and an illegal alien for living in the home in which he was born, inside the Jerusalem boundary. Jerusalem's council forces Rhateb to pay substantial property taxes on his house but that does not give him the right to live in it, and he is periodically arrested for doing so. Rhateb's children have been thrown out of their Jerusalem school, he cannot register a car in his name - or rather he can, but only one with Palestinian number plates, which means he cannot drive it to his home because only Israeli-registered cars are allowed within Jerusalem - and he needs a pass to visit the centre of the city. The army grants him about four a year.
There is more. If Rhateb is not legally resident in his own home, then he is defined as an "absentee" who has abandoned his property. Under Israeli law, it now belongs to the state or, more particularly, its Jewish citizens. "They sent papers that said we cannot sell the land or develop it because we do not own the land. It belongs to the state," he says. "Any time they want to confiscate it, they can, because they say we are absentees even though we are living in the house. That's what forced my older brother and three sisters to live in the US. They couldn't bear the harassment."
The 'apartheid wall'
There are few places in the world where governments construct a web of nationality and residency laws designed for use by one section of the population against another. Apartheid South Africa was one. So is Israel...............




Worlds apart | World news | The Guardian

[El Kabong]

Ah the good old Apartheid Wall...don't you mean the "Awww Now we Can't Suicide Bomb You" Wall